Basics of the Interface: Once you’ve turned iPhone on using the top Sleep/Wake Button, iPhone relies upon its touch screen for almost all of its user interactions. You swipe your finger across a locking mechanism on the screen to unlock the touchscreen—it’s locked by default to prevent accidental button presses—then use the on-screen buttons for everything else. You can press the physical Home button under the screen to go back a menu, and press the Sleep/Wake button to re-lock the phone’s screen.

Apple’s current suite of non-core applications includes SMS Text Messaging ("Text"), Calendar, Photos, Camera, Calculator, Stocks, Maps, Weather, Notes, Clock, and YouTube, plus a Settings menu, as well as four core applications: Phone, Mail, the Safari web browser, and iPod.

Generally speaking, Apple uses the center of the screen for the bulk of the action, with context-appropriate buttons placed largely near the screen’s edges. This enables you to scroll, pinch, and tap in the middle of the display; only errant motions near the screen’s edges will trigger other features.

A keyboard, described more fully below, appears on screen whenever it’s appropriate or necessary to enter text on the screen. Apple claims that in “about a week,” you’ll be thumb-typing faster on iPhone than any other small keyboard, though it provides no tactile feedback. The keyboard can auto-correct spelling errors for you, if you desire.

Scrolling feels very good, but not perfect. It will take a tiny amount of user training, comparable to your first time with an iPod, before it feels perfectly comfortable. That’s mostly because icons are now in unfamiliar places on the screen, and you need to make sure you touch the right place on the screen in order to activate them. According to Apple, gestures such as pinch aren’t angle-dependent; our initial impression that they might be may just be attributable to the brief user learning curve, and your need to place enough pressure on the screen to have the pinching motion properly recognized.

The unit’s first screen background—displayed when it’s locked and waiting for a call—can be set at any time from any picture on the unit. This is a really nice feature, but other menus do not use this image as their background. As of early June, it appears that at least some of the main menu’s icons can be rearranged by the user, but this is not as yet known for certain.